Twin peaks

Elite skills in both football and cricket could be expected to precipitate conflict. But, in the fourth of his All-Rounders series, Peter Hanlon finds that Geoff Parker was up to the challenge.

WHEN he talks to today's incarnation of his teenaged self, Geoff Parker doesn't muck about. "I basically say to them, ‘Whatever you want to do, you're only going to be able to do one of them now, you've got to choose. If you decide to play footy, you'll probably never play cricket again."'

In truth, Port Adelaide's recruiting manager knows that if they're having that conversation, the subject has most likely decided on football already, which he reckons markets itself very well at the age bracket where multi-talented kids must choose a single sporting path.

At length, Parker found his way to footy, too, although the to-ing and fro-ing he experienced betrays that it wasn't easy being a true sporting all-rounder.

"It's been a disjointed life," he said with a laugh. And how.

Parker grew up fast — in physique, and in the level of his play. From the age of 15 he played cricket and football with and against men, turning out among peers only in the underage representative teams he made — Victorian schoolboys football, state under-16 cricket, All-Australian in football's under-17 Teal Cup, Australia's under-19 cricket team, which he captained to victory in the inaugural Youth World Cup.

"I was just a young bloke enjoying myself," he said. "The sun would stop shining, I'd play footy. The sun would come out again, I'd play cricket. I never really thought that I was actually doing two things at a reasonable level."

That level was soon more than just reasonable. Arriving at Windy Hill from Ringwood as a 16-year-old in 1984, Kevin Sheedy soon picked him to play against Hawthorn in the old night series at Waverley. When he bumped into Sheedy at the draft last month, the veteran coach was straight on to it: "Remember that night game? You played on Gary Ayres!"

Eighteen months later, still 17, Parker played the first of 37 first-class matches for Victoria, against the touring Indians at the MCG. He batted for a fair while without making many, eventually falling to the wily, willowy spinner Laxman Sivaramakrishnan. "I didn't really have any idea what he was bowling." His medium-pacers nipped out Roger Binny. " ‘Spotty' gave me a bowl," he said of Ray Bright, who was also captain at his district club, Richmond. "He was about the only bloke who'd bowl me!"

His parents didn't push him either way, just supported him, went along and watched. His dad often drove him to training, "and Ringwood to Essendon's not five minutes away". Sometimes, he spoke to Craig Bradley, the Carlton footballer he roomed with during second XI games, about their sporting juggle. Or Simon O'Donnell, the state captain who'd left footy behind. But mostly, he just played. "We weren't looking at each other thinking, ‘We're different."'

Once, he returned from an under-19 tour of New Zealand the night before Essendon's last practice game. He drove to Geelong with Dean Bailey for a look, and Sheedy threw him into the reserves. "It nearly killed me — I'd been back in the country less than 24 hours."

Yet, he says Sheedy encouraged his cricket, never said, "Mate, you're gunna play footy and that's it." His tolerance was such that, in five seasons at Essendon, Parker took part in only one pre-season training session. "We jogged from Windy Hill to Cross Keys and did a shitload of running." He can't remember how he came to be there, and not batting in a net at Punt Road.

Midway through the 1987 footy season, he made his senior debut on a Friday night against West Coast in Perth. He remembers fellow Ringwood boy Paul Salmon "kicking a few" (11), and the Bombers winning. Landing back in Melbourne, he was summoned to the Australian Cricket Board offices, told they were establishing an academy, offered a spot in the first intake.

"I told Sheeds at training two nights later, said, ‘I want to do it, I want to play Test cricket.' The coach gave his blessing, and Parker spent the 1988 winter in Adelaide. Warned off playing football, he ran the water for former Bomber Paul Weston at West Torrens, had the odd kick with academy mate Jamie Cox, couldn't shake the bug.

He turned down the chance to play cricket in England in 1989 to go back to Essendon, feeling the Bombers had been good to him. "I must have been a bit torn, or I wouldn't have gone back."

Parker played two more senior games, in the centre in the Windy Hill cricket pitch bog. A score of 3.10 (28) was good enough to beat Footscray; he remembers showering at half-time to strip the black Merri Creek mud from his body.

He shared summer fields with hard men such as Bright and Merv Hughes, copped the standard David Hookes verbal initiation on his Shield debut. His first reserves footy game at 16 featured an "altercation" with Bomber-turned-Magpie Ron Andrews at Victoria Park; he was surrounded by toughness, but didn't feel undersized or out of place.

It began to feel normal, being around such luminaries every weekend. "It was probably more schoolmates who were in awe — not of you, but of the people you were mixing with."

Essendon's strength was double-edged. "I'd come in and look up, Terry Daniher's on the half-forward line, Timmy Watson's standing next to him, Simon Madden's in the ruck, Paul Salmon's in the goal square ... I'd think, ‘It doesn't really matter if I don't get a kick here.' " The drawback was obvious – it was hard to get a game.

By now in his 20s, there were still more shifts in focus. He spent the 1990 winter playing Lancashire League cricket in England, played in a winning Shield final with Victoria the next summer and, after asking Essendon if he could train "just to keep fit", found himself a reserves fill-in alongside soon-to-be-premiership youngsters such as Joe Misiti, Mark Mercuri and David Calthorpe.

"Sheeds said they might think about drafting me. I said, ‘You know, I'm not actually playing footy!' "

Politics in Victorian cricket drained his enthusiasm and enjoyment, so Parker moved to South Australia to play for Woodville (abandoning his first-class ambition), and footy with South Adelaide. When his old mate Jamie Siddons took over as coach of the state team, he found himself propping up a young middle-order; almost five years after leaving Victoria, he was a Shield cricketer again.

"Are you still going to play footy?" Siddons asked him. There was a directive in the question. "So I gave away footy again."

His comeback game happened to be at the MCG, against Berry, Shane Warne, his old housemate Paul Reiffel. Parker, aged 28, made his maiden century. "It was just unfortunate I wasn't wearing a blue cap."

During his three years in a red cap, he started scouting young footballers for Melbourne. He remembers Sheedy asking him years earlier, when he returned from his year at the cricket academy, "Who are the good players over there?" He told him Kieran Sporn looked all right, Michael Warner had something, a kid named Michael Long was a real talent.

"It's funny, they all ended up at Essendon," he said, still doubtful his verdict played a part. "[But] maybe even then I had a knack for it."

Living in a man's sporting world while still a boy had its pitfalls. Parker remembers spending Saturday nights at older Essendon teammates' houses if he couldn't get a lift home with Salmon, Bailey or Gary O'Donnell, and confesses he doesn't have many friends from school.

But all those teams, all those talents he shared ovals and change rooms with, have given him a network that stretches around Australia and beyond. "Pretty much anywhere work takes me, there's people I can look up."

He hasn't spoken to James Sutherland about it, doesn't know what cricket is doing beyond the Big Bash to grow its audience, but thinks the sport has definitely lost ground. A nephew who is in the Swans' academy in Sydney could never play cricket because he's already training for football. "Footy's big all over the country now, it's really taken the space and taken the minds of kids."

Old cricketers, particularly batsmen, often look back in anger, rueful they didn't achieve more. Parker isn't one of them, and isn't totally sold on the notion he'd have gone further had he been gifted at only one sport. "I trained as hard as I could when I was there, then that was it, I didn't give it a lot of thought."

He knows now that Test cricketers are made in the extra sessions, the 24/7 devotion. "I think about what Deano [Jones] was doing, I didn't want to do that."

His cricket bag is in the shed at home, keeping safe Victorian, South Australian and Australian under-19 caps, the bat from that first hundred, Essendon and Teal Cup All-Australian jumpers. His daughters, 12-year-old Charlotte and Imogen, 10, are impressed by footage of their dad playing footy, and to find he was a cricket teammate of that funny Damien Fleming who commentates on the telly.

An old English teammate alerted him a while back to an article written by Mike Atherton, who captained England in the 1988 Youth World Cup, wondering what had become of his hugely talented adversary. Parker could tell him he's content with how his sporting life panned out.

"The thing I know is I loved playing football and I loved the sport, and that's why I'm working in it now. I liked playing cricket, and I like watching cricket, but I never loved playing cricket. You can't have regrets. It's what I did at the time, I had a lot of fun and made a lot of friends.''

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